


fairer than death

by elanoides



Category: Critical Role (Web Series), UnDeadwood (Web Series)
Genre: (i am so glad that au tag exists), Alternate Universe - Princess Bride Fusion, Friends to Lovers, M/M, UnDeadwood Mini-series (Critical Role)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-18
Updated: 2019-11-18
Packaged: 2021-02-10 04:14:26
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,207
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21473575
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/elanoides/pseuds/elanoides
Summary: Matthew does not say the words he knows. He does not pray for grace, or will, or absolution. He asks instead that his hands be steady, that his sight be true, that his heart be calm at the moment of the gunshot when he kills the Man in Black.(or: a Princess Bride-flavored Clayson au.)
Relationships: Reverend Matthew Mason/Clayton Sharpe
Comments: 16
Kudos: 90





	fairer than death

**Author's Note:**

> I know Clayton’s last words were completing a Princess Bride reference, okay. I promise I started this au fully a week ago. (Dovetails nicely, though.) 
> 
> Title from the book version of The Princess Bride (specifically, the final line).
> 
> And thanks to the Undeadwood discord! ;)

The news comes on a Friday morning. It’s clear and sunny, and Matthew’s opened all the windows in the church to let the spring breeze in. Still a bit of a nip to the air, but the winter was long enough and cold enough that he’s happy to have even the slightest bit of warmth.

He’s at the back of the sanctuary, sweeping out the last pews, when the door swings open and slams into the wall. Footsteps stump into the church, and the sheriff barks, “Mason!”

Matthew schools his face into a mask of priestly kindness. It takes a few seconds, but he finally manages it and turns, broom still in hand. “How may I help you?”

“You’re needed,” Sheriff Hubert says.

“Has someone died?” Someone’s usually died, in Deadwood.

“Someone’s about to.” Hubert thrusts a sheet of paper at him. Matthew takes it.

The message isn’t long, but he has to read it three times through before he can comprehend it. As soon as he does, he crushes the understanding back down again. He doesn’t have time to have ice in his veins or searing rage in the back of his throat or old, old tears in his eyes. He doesn’t have time to put the paper between his teeth, sling the shotgun across his back, and ride for the hills. He has to be the priest of the Church of Deadwood, and he has to be that _now_.

“Thank you, Sheriff,” he says. “I appreciate the news. You know I like to keep abreast of events in town.” Matthew pauses, measuring his next sentence. “Do you want me to go and have this parley with them? At—” he glances at the note— “at sundown on Lightning Hill?”

“Outlaws ain’t about to kill a priest,” Hubert says. “And who knows, maybe you can stall them, since they asked for you specifically. Read some of your Good Book. Obviously we’re not bringing the money.” He points at the sheet of paper in Matthew’s hand. “We’ll ride out an hour before sundown, get there ahead of them.”

“All right,” Matthew says. “All right.”

“Good.” Hubert turns and starts to leave the church.

“You’re wrong, you know,” Matthew says to his retreating back.

Hubert stops, but doesn’t turn. “What?”

“Maybe there are outlaws that wouldn’t kill a priest,” Matthew says. “But the Man in Black and his band are murderers. They do not care about life. They will end all of us given the slightest provocation.” Hubert hasn’t said anything, and Matthew bulls onward: “Haven’t you heard? The Dread Revenge don’t leave anyone who crosses them alive.”

Hubert looks back. “That’s right, I almost forgot. How long has it been? Four years, must be. Sharpe, wasn’t it? Poor kid. Got himself killed in that caravan.”

Matthew hasn’t killed anyone in a long time, and he hasn’t ever wanted to kill anyone except the Man in Black, but in that moment he considers punching the bones of the sheriff’s nose up into his brain just to watch him die. It isn’t like anyone would miss him, in this town.

The sheriff grins like a vulture and walks out.

It was winter when Matthew met Clayton. He sat in the pew with Joseph and Clara Sharpe and ducked his head during prayers, maybe just to keep it low. Had the family nose, but none of the smile, at least not at first. He was an orphan, Matthew’s father told him, the same fifteen years old as Matthew, come up from Texas to the aunt and uncle who were the only family he had left.

Matthew had tried to talk to him. He hadn’t gotten far at first—got a brief handshake, quickly broken, and no introduction at all. That wasn’t unexpected; most people didn’t care for a preacher’s son at first glance. But he’d kept trying, kept chasing after the dark hair and hunched shoulders vanishing through the gaggle of Sunday churchgoers, and when one day he turned around and saw him standing there already, Matthew’s heart nearly leapt out of his chest.

“Amos Clayton Kinsley,” Clayton had said, without preamble. “Going by Sharpe now. And Clayton. If you don’t mind.”

“Matthew Mason,” Matthew had said, heart still racing. “Good to meet you, Clayton.”

Clayton had nodded once and vanished again, but after that they spoke more and more often, until Matthew began to expect to see him after church even if he hadn’t attended the service. He still doesn’t remember how it happened after that—not the how or the why or the when. All he knows that he realized, one night, that the perpetual scowl vanished from Clayton’s eyes whenever he looked at him, as if it had never been there at all.

Matthew didn’t say anything right then, just passed the bottle of moonshine back in exchange for a flask half-full of whiskey. He sipped from the flask and watched Clayton took a longer drink from the bottle, head tossed back, sprawled on the side of Lightning Hill like he’d always been there.

“The Big Dipper’s out,” Matthew said.

Clayton looked up at him. “What?”

Matthew pointed toward the northern horizon. “Over there.”

Clayton sipped from the bottle again, staring north. He pointed higher up. “That one’s Cassiopeia.”

Matthew looked at him. “Cassiopeia?”

“The queen on her throne,” Clayton said, still staring upward. “Kind of a zigzag shape. Look.”

Matthew slid down on his back in the grass and laid next to him, close enough to look along the line of his upraised arm. Sure enough, he found the constellation, which might have been the shape of a throne in profile. “I see it,” he said.

Clayton looked over at him, barely inches away, just for a moment. Then he looked away and moved his hand lower, to the west, as if sighting down his shotgun. “Cygnus,” he said, “the swan. Like a cross.”

Sure enough, there was a cross where he pointed—long-winged, as though flying over them to the east. “I see it,” Matthew said again.

Clayton pointed out every constellation he saw, seemingly enough to fill the sky. Maybe there were that many constellations, or maybe Clayton had made up a few; Matthew couldn’t find it in himself to care. If he leaned a little more into Clayton as the night went on—well, maybe Clayton didn’t notice. Or maybe he leaned back.

They spent that winter circling each other like hawks—drifting nearer, and nearer still, but never quite touching. Months passed, day by day.

Then Clayton kissed him at dusk on Lightning Hill on the longest day of the year, holding Matthew’s hand as gentle as the evening wind. They were seventeen years old, and the first news of the war had just reached them, and the sky was the soft gray-blue of good steel and prairie flax and Clayton’s eyes.

Matthew never looked back.

Lightning Hill always seemed to be the place they returned to. It was a single bare hilltop with one lone lightning-struck pine, far from town, but near enough to leave town after dark and return right before dawn. You could see the entire world from there, Matthew always thought, even though he knew the world was far too wide for that. Sometimes Clayton stared south like he could see Texas just over the horizon.

They said their goodbyes on Lightning Hill, too—not the goodbye in town, handshakes after the church supper, but the real goodbye, past midnight and out of reach of the lights of Deadwood. Matthew would go east to the war front, joining his father’s reserve battalion, and Clayton was returning to Texas to find work on a ranch. They’d agreed to write, agreed to return, every promise that seemed worth making; all that was left was the goodbye, and it had brought the two of here, beneath the lone tall tree on the hilltop, half-tangled in each other’s arms.

“Matt,” Clayton had said, softly, into Matthew’s shoulder. “What’re we gonna do after this?”

“We’ll write letters,” Matthew said, though they’d discussed it at least three dozen times already, “and come back—”

“Not that,” Clayton said. “What’re we gonna do after everything else? After we’re both home?”

They hadn’t talked about _after_ yet; it seemed far away, intangible compared to the _tomorrow_ now racing toward them. But the night was still on top of Lightning Hill, and the stars were too many to count, and he looked up into the sky and let himself think about what could be next. “I might have to take over the church,” he said slowly. “So I’d be here. Early Sunday mornings. You know.”

Clayton nodded, the motion felt rather than seen. “Thought I’d talk to Joseph and Clara about their land.” He’d always called his aunt and uncle by their names. “They’re both getting on, and they never had kids.”

“They’d will it to you,” Matthew said instantly. “Of course they would.”

“Maybe,” Clayton said. “Guess I’ll see.”

“After this,” Matthew said, because the future still felt too vast.

“After,” Clayton agreed.

Matthew returned to Deadwood three years after that night on Lightning Hill. Clayton never did.

Matthew closes up the church for the day—nobody would be there anyway, and they know where to find him if they do, by some miracle, want to talk—and goes up to his room on the second floor. He shuts the door behind himself and sits down heavily on the bed. For a moment, he rests his head in his hands and thinks about crying.

He gets up instead and kneels beside his bed. There is a case underneath, wooden and weathered, tucked beside a chest of winter clothes. Matthew does not touch the case often, but he knows its size and shape as intimately as he knows his own hands. He sits back on his bed with the case on his lap, and with a long breath, he eases back the lid.

The shotgun laid within is not a thing of beauty. The stock is dull and scraped in places, and the metal of the barrel is scarred. The breach is open and empty, with a slight rime of dust; the gun has clearly not been fired in years. Matthew touches it with a gentleness.

He is familiar with the weight of the gun—had been taught to fire it, some seven years ago, and has held it several times since then. It still feels heavy in his hands when he lifts it from the case.

He inspects every inch of the firing mechanism. He swabs out the barrels with a scrap of cotton rag. He buffs the stock and action with a soft cloth, brushing off what little dust might be there, and even when he is done he still does not feel ready.

There, in the room above the church of Deadwood, with Clayton Sharpe’s shotgun gleaming in his hands, Matthew begins to pray.

He does not say the words he knows. He does not pray for grace, or will, or absolution. He asks instead that his hands be steady, that his sight be true, that his heart be calm at the moment of the gunshot when he kills the Man in Black. 

Night comes more quickly than Matthew expects, and more slowly. He meets the sheriff, his deputy Rugen, and some of the more eager townsfolk outside the church as the sun dips toward the horizon. They provide him with a horse; he rides with them. The shotgun is oddly light across his back. Six cartridges rattle in his pocket—enough to reload three times over, after he fires the two already loaded in the gun. He doesn’t plan on needing more than one.

They ride up into the hills as the sunset grows deeper, hanging thick around the branches of the pines. The Man in Black couldn’t possibly have any idea what it meant when he chose Lightning Hill as the meeting place, but it feels cruel all the same.

He hadn’t seen Lightning Hill in the past five years. He told himself he was busy with the church—his father’s passing had left him the only one to care for it, but the church saw less and less use every year. The shotgun, weathered but well-cared for, had been enough to keep; Joseph and Clara Sharpe had given it to him when he asked. The body was gone, taken by animals or scavengers, he was told, but the shotgun had been left behind.

The path winds upward, and the shadows that surround him turn black.

Hubert and Rugen draw to a halt near the top of the hill, hidden in a small clearing below the treeline. The rest of the group stops behind them, jostling and whispering. “Shut up!” Hubert hisses, and turns to talk to Rugen in a low voice.

“Think they’re gonna be there?” someone mutters beside Matthew. He could recognize the voice if he tried, but he can’t be bothered right now.

“What, like an ambush?” someone else replies.

“Nah, up there waiting. We’re the ones doing the ambushing.”

“They’re not gonna be,” a third voice chimes in. “Outlaws never stick to their word, that’s why we’re gonna surround the hill while the Reverend goes up.”

“Shut up!” Hubert snaps, and turns his horse around. Rugen stays in place, staring up to the dusk-blue crest of Lightning Hill above them. “Here’s the plan,” Hubert says. “The Reverend’s going up the hill to parley with these fuckers. He’s gonna talk to them and find out what they want. When he gives the signal, we go.”

There won’t be any need for a signal, but nobody but Matthew needs to know that. Or rather, there will be a signal, and it will be the report of a double-barreled shotgun.

He’s grown cold, he realizes, in a detached kind of way. He hasn’t been this cold in a long time. But that’s all right.

“The sun’s down,” Rugen says.

“All right,” Hubert says, and nods to Matthew. “Head on up.”

Matthew dismounts from his horse. It isn’t worth riding the last hundred feet up the hill, and the path is narrow and rocky—worse in the dark. He pushes through the cluster of men and horses and starts to walk.

The trees thin out as he approaches the top of the hill. The view is beautiful. Deadwood glitters at the bottom of the valley, a handful of lamplight fireflies in the darkness. The sky above is a vast swath of blues and grays, misted with high, thin clouds like silk lace. The first stars are starting to peer through.

Matthew isn’t looking at any of that.

At the top of the hill, beneath the lightning-struck pine, there is a single figure—a gunman, wearing a broad black hat and a sharp black coat, with a scarf around his face and a mask to hide his eyes. The butts of his pistols have a faint, pearly sheen in the near-darkness.

“Good evening,” Matthew calls.

“Evenin’,” the gunman replies. The end of the word is sanded smoothly off. “Reverend Mason, I presume?”

“And you must be the Man in Black.”

The Man in Black touches the brim of his hat to Matthew. “That I am.”

“I think we have some talking to do.”

“Yes,” the Man in Black says. “We do.”

Matthew approaches a little farther. The distance between them closes—thirty paces, twenty. At ten he stops and says, “You left a note on the sheriff’s doorstep, asking for them to send the preacher to the top of Lightning Hill at sundown with the contents of the town coffers in easily handled bags.”

The Man in Black inclines his head.

“Obviously, we didn’t bring the money,” Matthew says.

“I would expect nothing less.”

“Indeed.” Matthew pauses, thinking over his next words. Then he says, “You should be aware that this hill is surrounded by a dozen of Deadwood’s finest.” That’s an oxymoron, but the hill is surrounded, which is the important part. “You have no escape.”

“Wouldn’t be so sure of that if I were you, preacher,” the Man in Black says.

Matthew raises an eyebrow. “You’re confident.”

“I’ve earned it. Now cut to the goddamn chase. I’m willing to let you say your piece, but we have some business to get to.”

“Very well,” Matthew says. “Do you remember the name Clayton Sharpe? Amos Clayton Kinsley, but he preferred Clayton Sharpe.”

A pause. Then:

“Why don’t you refresh my memory,” the Man in Black says.

“He was nineteen years old when you killed him,” Matthew says. “You held up his caravan, and you murdered every last soul. His body—” he has to swallow down the things rising in his throat— “his body wasn’t found.”

“Clayton Sharpe,” the Man in Black says, testing the name. “That’d be four years ago, now? Guess I do remember him.” He considers a moment, then adds, “He died bravely. Didn’t beg for mercy. Just said ‘wait’.”

Matthew just—stares.

“So I asked what he’d said ‘wait’ for,” the Man in Black says. “And he said he had to get back home to see the boy he loved when he came back from the war. A preacher’s son, handsome as the hills. He swore this boy of his was gonna wait for him. Guess that was you.” The Man in Black takes one step forward, then another. “But how long did it take you to stop waiting when you heard he was dead? A week? A day, before you took your fucking vows and hid in your church? A body isn’t found, and you’re sure he’s dead? He thought you loved him!”

“Of course I loved him,” Matthew spits. “I never stopped—I—when I heard he was gone—” He has to choke back a sob before he snarls, “I died that day.”

He takes the shotgun from his shoulder and levels it, the stock tucked to his collar, finger on the trigger. “I died that day,” he says again, “and now you’re coming with me. Any last words?”

“That gun—” the Man in Black says, and then, “Wait—”

Matthew blinks. “Is that what you want to be your last words?”

Then he sees that the Man in Black has thrown his hat to the ground, has ripped the scarf away from his face, and finally lifts the mask from his eyes from shaking hands and drops it in the dirt.

The Man in Black has thick, dark hair, loose around his face, and a tiny scar across the bridge of his nose. The Man in Black carries two long pistols, and he knows the shotgun in Matthew’s hands. The Man in Black has eyes like wildflowers and steel and the sky at dusk, blue-gray and brilliant.

He steps forward, slowly, closing the distance between them. Matthew is frozen, staring at the specter in the Man in Black’s clothes, and the name slips from his mouth: “Clayton?”

“I thought you’d forgotten,” Clayton says. “The church—I thought you’d turned right around and found something better. If I’d known—”

“I could never forget you,” Matthew says. Now that he’s not blinded by rage, he recognizes Clayton’s voice, the tremble at the bottom of it that appears when he’s wishing for something he can’t say.

Clayton is close now, close enough to push aside the barrel of the shotgun in Matthew’s hands. There’s a new scar along his cheek. He’s grown a mustache. “You kept my gun,” he says, quietly.

“I was planning to kill the Man in Black with it,” Matthew admits. The cold in his chest has vanished like mist in the sun. It’s dark, but he can still see the lines of Clayton’s face. Revealed, he is as familiar to Matthew as his own heart. There are questions to ask—how, and where, and why, but he can’t even begin to form them. The space in his chest that his vengeance just vacated is beginning to fill, slowly, with something very near to joy.

“Glad you didn’t,” Clayton says. The smallest of smiles flits across his face. “Matt—”

A shot rings out.

Matthew’s stunned until he sees Clayton stagger, eyes wide, and his whole body turns to ice. He lunges forward to catch him, but someone shoves between them, pushes him back. He rushes forward again, but shouts and hoofbeats are filling the night, and Matthew can’t see Clayton, can’t reach him—

“Good job, Reverend!” Hubert shouts in his ear. “Got him distracted long enough! We’ll tie this all up tonight.”

“Stop!” Matthew shouts, and he tries to slam his elbow into Hubert’s face but Hubert’s already swinging up onto his horse, and then the whole posse is whooping and shouting, rocketing off downhill into the darkness with Clayton somewhere among them. Matthew doesn’t even think, just bolts back down the hill.

When he gets to the clearing, his horse is gone.

“_Fuck_,” he spits, starts searching for anything he can use, anything that will help him save Clayton. Nothing comes to hand, and he’s about to just start running when the cold, hard barrel of a gun presses into the small of his back.

In that moment, Matthew realizes that something inside him has snapped. It’s a bad break, like a bone, like an old, twisted tree, outlasting every possible hope until it’s struck by lightning from a clear sky. Like a heart.

“Now, Reverend,” a feminine voice says, “what’s got you so upset?”

“Someone I used to love returned from the grave before my eyes and he’ll be dragged back into it before the night is out,” he says. “Who the fuck are you?”

“Used to love?” the person says.

Since the person questioning him is also the person holding a gun to his back, Matthew says, “In the sense that I’ve thought he was dead for four years, yes, used to love.” He takes a breath, continues, “I would like to have the chance to love him again, but I’m not going to get that if he—if they get to him.”

“Let it go, Miriam,” another voice chimes in, this one lower and exasperated. “You saw them together. If this guy knows the town, we better put him on a horse.”

“And put ourselves at risk as well?”

“I would like to help,” Matthew says. “Believe me, I—I have a stake in this too.”

“Yeah, you sure do,” the second voice says. “Miriam, we gotta go.”

Miriam sighs, and addresses him: “If you turn on us, I will not hesitate to shoot you where you stand.”

“I understand,” Matthew says.

The gun retreats from the small of his back, and he turns around. Two people are standing behind him, both dressed in black: a woman in divided riding skirts—must be Miriam—and a man in a vest and trousers. They’re both armed; the man has a rifle across his back, and the woman has a pistol in hand. The only thing they can be is Clayton’s band—the Dread Revenge, if he kept that name too (and how on earth, Matthew wonders, did he manage to _become_ the Man in Black?).

“When can we go?” he asks instead, because that isn’t important now. Not very many things are.

“Soon as Arabella gets back,” the man says. “Aloysius Fogg, by the way. Pleasure.”

“Matthew Mason,” Matthew says. “Are there only four of you?”

“That’s how it works,” Aloysius says. “All in the reputation. If a caravan hears the name Dread Revenge, it doesn’t matter how many of us are pulling guns.”

Miriam’s staring into the trees, and mutters, “Damn it, where’s Arabella?”

Just then, there’s a rustle some hundred yards off. It becomes a rush, then individual hoofbeats, and then a woman bursts through the trees on horseback, leading three more horses behind her.

“Oh, thank God,” Miriam says. “Bella, we’re taking this one.” She nods to Matthew, who feels a little insulted, but the prospect of getting on horseback and back into town is so close he can almost taste it.

“We’ll have to swap horses, then,” Arabella says, swinging off the back of the palomino she’d been on. “I’ll take Clayton’s. Aly, can Clayton’s old boyfriend take yours if you ride mine?”

Matthew would dispute it, but she still isn’t wrong, and they need to go quickly. “Yeah, Mist’ll behave,” Aloysius says, patting the gray’s nose. “Right, girl?” The horse snorts softly and noses at his face, and he chuckles. “All right.”

Arabella climbs onto the black horse that had been at the back of the group, riding skirt flapping as she swings up. Miriam and Aloysius mount up, and Matthew follows suit.

“Well, lead the way,” Miriam tells him, and he doesn’t hesitate to urge Aloysius’s horse forward into the night.

The ride is faster downhill, but they have to move carefully enough to keep the horses from breaking an ankle, and Matthew swears he feels every second slip by until they emerge onto the road at the bottom of the hill. The Dread Revenge slow to a halt around him, and he follows suit if only to not get shot in the back. “Where would they have taken him?” Arabella asks. After a beat of silence, she adds, “Reverend?”

“Back to town,” Matthew says, “and fast.”

They take off at a gallop again, and in minutes the lights of Deadwood begin to glow through the trees. Matthew strains his senses, trying to spot some glint of light or hear some muffled sound that will help him find the sheriff’s posse. He hears nothing until they reach the main street of Deadwood; as they pass the first ramshackle buildings at the edge of town, the screaming starts.

It’s faint on the wind, and he barely registers it as a voice at first, but it keeps going and going, almost without stopping for breath. Matthew’s never heard Clayton sound like that in his life but he knows it must be him. The hoofbeats nearly drown out the sound of the scream, but Matthew clings to it: if Clayton is screaming, sick though it makes him feel, he’s alive.

“The sheriff’s office!” Matthew shouts, and closes the last yards, nearly falling off Aloysius’s horse as he dismounts. The Dread Revenge are right on his heels.

Then the door to the office swings open, and the sheriff’s posse pours out, chatting and laughing. As soon as they see the Dread Revenge, they scramble for their guns, but they’re much too late. Arabella and Aloysius, still on horseback, are already firing, and three of the posse collapse to the dirt.

Then a shot must hit—Arabella cries out, clutches at her arm, and in another flash of gunfire two more of the posse are on the ground, but the last is still standing, and he rushes forward and levels his revolver at Arabella before she can recover.

“Got ‘em!” he calls back to the sheriff’s office—maybe didn’t see his friends go down, maybe he’s just too jaded to care. The whole posse’s like that. “Now, if you just come quiet—”

He doesn’t get to finish the sentence. Miriam steps from behind Arabella’s horse and calmly shoots him in the chest.

Matthew sees all of this out of the corner of his eye. He’s already on the porch, at the door, reaching for the knob. Then Arabella, Aloysius, and Miriam are running up beside him.

“Start cooperating and I won’t tell Deputy Rugen to make it slower. Are those your friends out there?” Hubert’s asking.

“Fuck you,” Clayton rasps, and Matthew almost punches the door in right there but Miriam grabs his arm.

“Hold,” she hisses. “If you go in half-cocked that’s the end of us.”

Only the fact that she’s right, and the knowledge that the sheriff and his deputy are far better shots than their posse, holds Matthew still.

“Very well,” Rugen says, and then Clayton cries out sharply, his voice cracking, but the scream is over almost as soon as it begins. Matthew unlimbers the shotgun from his back and holds it ready at his shoulder, blood frozen in his veins.

“Just the two inside,” Aloysius says, peering through the windows. “Ready?”

“You know he can make it worse than that,” Hubert says.

“Ready,” Arabella agrees.

Matthew remains cold. His finger rests on the trigger of the shotgun.

“Go,” Miriam says.

“Now answer me,” Hubert snaps. “Where are your friends now?”

Matthew shoulder-slams the door open and the shotgun moves to Hubert like the needle of a compass. The last thing he hears is Aloysius yelling “Right here, fucker!” before the room becomes a blaze of gunfire.

Matthew opened fire at the same time Miriam, Aloysius, and Arabella did, on the cavalry reflexes burned into his bones. He doesn’t know who kills Hubert or Rugen, in truth, just that he fires two blasts of buckshot and then the room is very, very still.

When he sees Clayton, everything jolts into terrifying motion again.

He’s at his side in a heartbeat—less than—or his heart has stopped altogether. Matthew can’t find it in himself to care. Blood is beginning to pool beneath Clayton on the ground, and his chest is rising and falling in shallow gasps. There’s a wide knife wound along the length of one forearm, not deep, but so ragged it looks more like a flaying. A Bowie knife is jammed through the other shoulder, so deep it must have hit the floorboards of the sheriff’s office and pinned Clayton to the ground. His shirt is soaked with blood on one side—where he’d been shot, Matthew realizes, because of course the posse wouldn’t bother to bind the wound of a man they were torturing to death. Tiny flower-bursts of blood speckle Clayton’s chest, his throat, the corners of his mouth. Matthew counts them, follows them up, and when he sees Clayton’s eyelashes flutter it pulls him back to reality.

He kneels beside Clayton, hands hovering. “Clay?”

Clayton lifts his chin slightly, blinking. “That you, Matt?”

“Yes,” Matthew says, “yes, it’s me, I’m here. So are—” He looks up. Arabella, Aloysius, and Miriam are standing there. Miriam’s expression is the one he sees first; she looks relieved, but seems to be reserving judgement. “So’s everyone else.”

“Good,” Clayton says.

“We need to go,” Miriam says firmly. “Those gunshots drew attention, and the bodies won’t keep them for long. Where can we hide, Reverend?”

“The church,” Matthew says immediately. “It’s under my protection, and no one will look there first.”

“Good,” Miriam says. “Thank you.”

“Of course,” Matthew says. “Of course, I—I’d do anything.”

It takes some maneuvering to get the knife through Clayton’s shoulder out of the floorboards— Arabella won’t let them remove it entirely until they’re somewhere she can stop the bleeding, but finally Aloysius manages to get the knife loose from the wood, and Matthew lifts Clayton into his arms as carefully as he can. Clayton is shivering, he realizes, and his skin is too cool to the touch, but he’s lucid enough to swear violently when the wound in his side is jostled.

“There’s a crowd coming,” Miriam says from the window. “Those bodies won’t keep them busy for much longer. We have to move.”

Matthew leads the Dread Revenge through the back door of the sheriff’s office and through enough side streets to keep them out of sight. When they get to the back room of the church, he lays Clayton down on the cot he keeps for any wanderers who might drop by, but he finds he doesn’t want to let go. He sits on the cot with him and holds Clayton’s head in his lap, cups his jaw in his hands, stares at the curve of his eyelashes and remembers something he’s barely felt in years.

“We heard screaming,” Miriam’s saying. “You had us worried.”

Clayton chuckles, a small _heh_ like an owl’s call. Matthew feels it in his fingertips. “Not as bad as it sounded. Knew it’d help you get here quicker if I yelled, but they wouldn’t let me get away with it unless they thought it was because of them.” It’s the most he’s said since they found him, and it seems to tire him, but he looks up at Matthew and adds, “Glad you came.”

“I’m glad you came back,” Matthew murmurs, low in his chest. “Not glad to see you like this. But I’m glad you came back.”

“Said I would, didn’t I?” Clayton asks. Then his face contorts in a grimace, and Matthew jerks upright to see Arabella beginning to rinse around the knife in Clayton’s shoulder with a flask.

“This isn’t going to be pretty,” she warns, probably far too late.

“Figured,” Clayton says.

“But you have to stay awake. I need to know what hurts, and I need to know if you actually pass out from blood loss.”

“Sure thing,” Clayton tells her, sounding tired.

At a loss, Matthew runs his thumb along the line of Clayton’s jaw, getting his attention. Clayton looks up, and Matthew says, “Tell me what happened.”

“What about? And when?” 

“The caravan,” Matthew says. “Tell me about the Man in Black.”

“Yeah,” Clayton says. “All right.”

The tale is halting—it takes Arabella a long time to stitch the shoulder wound, longer to remove the bullets, and longer still to close the yawning, ragged gouge in Clayton’s wrist. Matthew holds him through it, and Clayton tells him a story of a Man in Black, a plea for mercy, a year of training, a title passed on. He talks of the last set of Dread Revenge and meeting his current band, and Arabella chimes in on some parts, filling in the moments when Clayton falters.

Miriam and Aloysius return at some point, having secured the perimeter or sought out supplies—or something, Matthew doesn’t really care, not when Clayton is alive and in his hands. They add details, anecdotes, corrections of places and dates and names, talking over and in between Clayton and Arabella like they’ve always done it. Maybe they have.

The story takes shape. It brings Clayton to the Colorado Territory, Utah Territory, even California—he talks about the redwood trees and the smell of the ocean and Matthew adores the light in his eyes. And it brings him back to Deadwood.

He was angry, he admits, and grieving. He’d assumed Matthew had forgotten about him as soon as he took over the church, had found something better, less sinful. At this point, Matthew forgets everything around them and curls himself over Clayton, holding him as close as he can. “I didn’t,” he says, “I didn’t, I never would have.”

“I know,” Clayton says. “I know.” 

And after that—after all of that—there’s the rest of the night, and there is quiet, and there’s a dawn. Matthew found blankets for the Dread Revenge, who all politely refused a bed and instead slept, apparently easily, on the floor of the little back room. He sat on the floor by Clayton’s cot, keeping some sort of vigil, or just reassuring himself that he was there.

He must drift off at some point; he wakes to find Clayton looking at him, eyes clearer than they had been the night before.

“Morning,” Clayton says softly.

“Morning,” Matthew says, and finds he’s already smiling.

“What’s that for?” Clayton asks, presumably about the smile.

“You’re alive,” Matthew says.

Clayton looks at him, all blue-gray eyes and faded scars. “Guess I am.”

“What’s next?” Matthew asks.

“Seem to remember a conversation we had about that,” Clayton says. “Don’t know if that still stands.” He frowns slightly. “Better talk to Joseph and Clara—if they’re still around?”

“They are, but,” Matthew says hastily, “that was more about what’s next, right now. Since we have time now...” He trails off, half-uncertain, struck by the look in Clayton’s eyes. “And we’re still– well, we’re alive. So we can decide what happens next.”

“Right now,” Clayton says—stops, and then restarts, “Then right now I’d like for you to kiss me, because I’m not too sure I can sit up to do it myself.”

Matthew gets up and sits on the edge of the cot. He leans down as slowly as he can manage, pressing his forehead to Clayton’s, and brushes the hair away from Clayton’s face.

“All right there?” Clayton asks, eyes searching.

“Of course,” Matthew says, and kisses him—just once, gentle, lingering.

It might be the shyest kiss they’ve had since their first. It’s a little dry, a little iron-tinted. It blows away every other time Matthew’s ever had the honor of kissing Clayton Sharpe.

“Are you crying?” Clayton asks. He’s gotten a hand up to cup the back of Matthew’s neck, and his thumb runs softly over the short ends of Matthew’s hair.

“No,” Matthew says, blinking the tears away. “Maybe. It’s all right. You?”

“We’re alive,” Clayton says. “Really the best I could hope for.”

It’s morning in Deadwood, and the sky outside the window is the blue of prairie flax and tempered steel and the eyes of the man beside him. It’s the blue Matthew has come to associate with happy endings.

**Author's Note:**

> "...life isn't fair. It's just fairer than death, that's all."
> 
> I'm @swallowtailed on tumblr-- come say hi! And please do leave a comment or a kudos if the mood strikes you.


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